A conversation
with Howard Hodgkin
Extracted from Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Prints, published by Thames & Hudson. Reproduced with the kind permission of Dr. Liesbeth Heenk, Sotheby’s Amsterdam, and Thames & Hudson.
Liesbeth Heenk, (LH), Howard Hodgkin, (HH)
LH How did you get involved in printmaking?
HH My first commercially published prints were made for Paul Cornwall-Jones at Petersburg Press. I knew him as a friend and greatly admired his work as a publisher. I was pleased when he asked me to make some prints for him, but it took me a long time to learn.
LH Why did it take such a long time?
HH Printmaking was so different from the way I painted that I could not easily move on to a different way of thinking. .
LH Perhaps also because you had to collaborate with other people?
HH Yes, I think that was difficult. The first prints I can remember making for him, Interior with Figure and Girl at Night [both 1966] in the ‘5 Rooms’ series [1966–68], were made with Matthieu in Zurich. I felt overcome by seeing prints made by Giacometti, and by Bernard Cohen, who was working there at the same time on another table. Bernard and I were both working for Paul Cornwall-Jones. Everybody seemed to know exactly what to do, whereas I was used to arriving at an image gradually. Paul said to me, ‘printmaking is not about finding an image, it is about producing one’, which I found a bit unnerving.
The ‘5 Rooms’ series were not my first prints, however. The print I made for the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Enter Laughing, for instance, was done earlier, in 1964. I think it is one of my best prints, because of the technique of screenprinting. To me this technique is fundamentally reproductive. The subject matter and the print work perfectly; they are one thing. I didn’t know anything about screenprinting and was actually apart from the whole process. I made the image at home, of course. I could see very easily what would happen, through using strips of paper tape and very different textures.Although I didn’t know anything about the technique, I felt completely in control; I knew exactly what I was doing. Chris Prater at Kelpra Studio in London was encouraging and helpful. He was a wonderful printer to work with. He did not stand over you, but he was there, he explained what was possible and what wasn’t.
LH Talking of Enter Laughing, there seems to be lot of humour in some of your prints. Not only in Enter Laughing, but also in prints such as Here We Are in Croydon [1979] or Mango [1990–91], for instance.
HH Yes, there is humour in some of them. I find it difficult to look at my prints, however. It is sometimes more difficult to look at them as a member of the audience, or pretending to be, than at my paintings. Prints often seem too close. I am constantly reminded of the printer and the printing process, perhaps because there is more than one result: the prints of an edition are never precisely the same.
LH Have your prints ever been affected by the editing of over zealous publishers?
HH I have been lucky in that respect. Perhaps there should have been four rather than ‘5 Rooms’, but I now quite like those prints.
LH As multiples, prints reach a large audience. Does this influence you in your printmaking?
HH Of course. An image that exists in an edition of four or five is therefore almost unique and totally different from one that exists in an edition of a hundred. I have at times tried to persuade my publishers that a smaller edition would be better. But that’s not necessarily true. I am particularly pleased with the ‘Venetian Views’ [1995], which were produced in an edition of sixty.
LH Why would a smaller edition usually be better? If you strive to make prints that look like posters or pieces of coloured paper, wouldn’t a larger edition seem more logical?
HH No.
LH On the one hand, you want your prints to be more like posters, on the other hand, you use hand colouring. Don’t you think this is mutually exclusive?
HH Yes. |
